Sosa remains committed to song

By Chris Wong

Here's the scene: I'm in a beautiful house on Vancouver's West Side interviewing one of Latin America's greatest and most adored singers by telephone-Argentina's Mercedes Sosa. An Argentine named Victor is providing translation and a Latino woman with Co-op Radio is also present. We're huddled around a speaker phone that connects us to Sosa in her Buenos Aires apartment overlooking Avenida 9 de Julio, known as the widest avenue in the world. At one point Sosa answers a question by doing what she does best: sing. We collectively smile as the 66-year-old icon vocalizes with a clear and rich tone that resonates through the speaker.

Sosa says she will include the piece in her March 22 performance at the Orpheum Theatre, the singer's first concert in Vancouver since 1995. What's the song about? "You'll realize by the way I'm singing what the essence of the song is," says Sosa. "You will be able to tell." In fact, the tune concerns a domestic worker in a shanty town who finds solace from poverty by singing a traditional song of her province and dancing with a broom. It's exactly the kind of lyric, conveying basic yet profound truths and offering hope, which Sosa has sung so expressively during her remarkable career spanning close to 40 years.

She was born in Tucum n, in Argentina's Andean northwest, on July 9-the country's Independence Day. By the mid-1960s, Sosa was at the forefront of the nueva canci¢n (new song) movement in South and Central America. Singer/songwriters in the movement combined traditional folk music with bold words that were central to the Latin American struggle for social change and political reform. Sosa has never been a prolific songwriter, but she interpreted songs that drew the ire of Argentina's military government. "The songs for which I was persecuted were mainly Chilean songs, from Violeta Parra and Victor Jara. These are songs that are really describing situations of oppression and rebellion."

After enduring censorship, harassment and being arrested on stage, Sosa went into exile in 1979. Before and after returning to Argentina in 1982, Sosa kept recording and touring as she built an extraordinary body of work. She nearly died after a serious illness in the late 1990s, but re-emerged to record albums including Misa Criolla (Creole Mass, composed by Argentine Ariel Ram¡rez), which won the Latin Grammy for best folk album in 2000.

"Art never stops in Argentina," says Sosa. "We are a nation with a very vibrant cultural life." But right now the country is preoccupied with the economic and political crisis that toppled the government in December and continues to reverberate in daily demonstrations. "It's a desperate situation," says Sosa. "People don't have access to their own money, so that very fact has made people react and rebel, become revolutionaries from one hour to the next and take to the street.

"This is something I have never seen before: chaos, a total dismantling of the country. We as a nation lived through periods of ideological persecution and killings, but I cannot compare that with what's happening now because it's a profound, profound crisis that includes everybody. This isn't affecting just poor people in the shanty towns. It's affecting the whole population, the middle class and everybody else."

It may be time for another nueva canci¢n movement in Argentina, but Sosa says the movement doesn't exist in her country anymore. She also rejects the label of "protest singer" that has sometimes been associated with her. "I'm more than a protest singer. I'm a committed singer. I'm a singer that's committed to my people, my society. A protest singer sounds like a teenager that's protesting. That's how I don't relate to that term. "Beyond the songs, there are many ways to protest. People can protest through their vote, and often people make mistakes, but that's a way to protest. And people are currently protesting with their pots and pans [which demonstrators bang against boarded-up facades of banks] and by cutting off roads. So the poor people, the people who need to raise their voice, they are the protestors. The artist works with them, like a companion. Those who change the status of things are the people, the communities. We can only sing, but they change things."

In Vancouver, Sosa will perform classic songs like Violeta Parra's "Gracias a la Vida" and new arrangements, including one based on a poem by Jorge Luis Borge (with music by ex-Pat Metheny sideman Pedro Aznar). How does she decide what to perform? "Choosing a song is very difficult. It's the most difficult task I have before every concert. What saves my career is that there's such a wealth of music and lyrics. There's such a variety of themes."

Sosa's core approach hasn't actually changed much. "Maybe some of the songs now are more descriptive, are a bit more profound in trying to take apart the nature of love, the nature of the human condition, the nature of life itself. But while the circumstances change, I don't change. I'm the same person, I'm the same singer."